During its inception in the Colonial Era, higher education was founded for the purpose of educating aristocratic white men (Cohen & Kisker, 2010). Today, men continue to hold the majority of institutional leadership positions and white men surpass the representation of women and men of all other races in professorial positions (Albertine,…

This article describes the redesign of a project-based course on soft and biological materials to include computational modeling. Including the construction of computational models in the course is described as a shift from constructivism--a theory that characterizes the development of formal reasoning, to constructionism--a theory that focuses on…

Recent scholarship in sociolinguistics and language education has examined how race and language intersect each other and how racism influences linguistic and educational practices. While racism is often conceptualized in terms of individual and institutional injustices, a critical examination of another form of racism--epistemological…

Evidence is widely recognized as an essential component of argumentation. Existing research has primarily focused on students' use of evidence to construct explanations or claims. In the present study, 54 11- to 12-year-old Chinese students participated in an extended discourse-based argumentation curriculum, along with an equivalent…

Institutions of higher education face an increasing demand for evidence that they are providing the high-quality educational experience promised in promotional materials. Accrediting bodies require assessment for accountability to ensure continuous improvement. Faculty at Christian higher education institutions join their secular counterparts in…

This study is framed in the social perspective of Epistemology of Science, and it aims to examine the epistemic operations performed by high school students while engaged in a role-play about food safety that requires them to engage in both argumentation and decision-making practices. The epistemic operations are examined on two different levels:…

It is a widely held view that students' epistemic beliefs influence the way they think and learn in a given context, however, in the science learning context, the relationship between sophisticated epistemic beliefs and success in scientific practice is sometimes ambiguous. Taking this inconsistency as a point of departure, we examined the…

This chapter brings together significant themes in the previous chapters, including collaborative research partnerships, voice and agency, self-image, relationships, multiple ways of knowing, difficult conversations, social change, and alternative adult education.

Students' ability to build knowledge, and transfer it within and between contexts is crucial to cumulative learning and to academic success. This has long been a concern of higher education research and practice. A central part of this concern for educators is creating the conditions that enable their students' deep learning, as this is an area of…

Preparing students for their lives beyond schooling appears to be a universal goal of formal education. Much has been done to make mathematics education more "realistic," but such activities nevertheless generally remain within the institutional norms of education. In this article, we assume that pedagogic relations are also an integral…

Promoting facility with content knowledge is one of the most important objectives of science teaching. Conventionally, the focus for this objective is placed on the substantive side of content knowledge (e.g. science concepts/laws), whereas its epistemic or ontological aspects (e.g. why do we construct concepts?) rarely receive explicit attention.…

This essay responds to recent philosophical interest in the Anthropocene by asking (Trachtenberg in "Inhabiting the Anthropocene: how we live changes everything," 2016): Can and should educators adopt, form, transmit, teach ways of living to maintain, if not enhance Earth's habitability, especially its habitability for diverse children?…

This paper investigates collaboration in teaching and learning and draws out implications for the promotion of collaboration within online environments. It is divided into four sections. First the case for collaboration, including specifically cooperative approaches, is explored. This case revolves around the impact of collaboration on the quality…

Problem-based learning is often characterised as an approach encompassing interdisciplinary learning; however, little attention has been explicitly paid to what a claim of interdisciplinary problem-based learning means in practice. Even less attention has been given to address the consequences of interdisciplinary problem-based learning for…

In this paper, we argue that the non-positivist origins that provided the impetus for the qualitative imagination over the past half century in educational research has undergone subtle, but nevertheless profound change and transformation as neoliberal forms of governmentality have increasingly colonised social and educational research. We examine…